Monday, December 17, 2012

TG fo' life

So not long after I got into skateboarding, the movie Back to the Future came out. I really didn't know much about skateboarding, such as brands, and who was cool or good at skating, I just tick tacked around my garage on my shiny new Variflex I had gotten for Christmas the year before. I had some plastic little boards growing up, but this was my first wider board and one I could balance standing up on. Back to the Future was a huge game changer for me. It was the first time I had seen someone do tricks outside of tick tacking around. Not long after that movie came out my buddy picked up the exact same board Marty McFly skeetched behind cars on in the movie. It was a VALTERRA! I was pretty jealous. It wasn't too long after that he had gotten his hands on a copy of The Bones Brigade Video Show somehow. It was huge eye opener to see people do other tricks besides push mongo and get drug behind cars around a fake city called Hill Valley. I was instantly hooked. My friend that had the Valterra was not rich, but got his parents to go out and buy him a brand new Mike McGill (exactly like the one on the wall at Tom's neon shop) and like the one in the Bones Brigade video. That video was also the first time I had ever seen Tommy Guerrero ride a skateboard. He instantly became my hero and I had to look like him, talk like him, grow my hair into a mullet like him, and ride his pro-model. Unfortunately I was a poor kid in a large family, so there wasn't much money to go around. By the time I started working around 13-14 and had money burning a hole in my pocket, I had been turned on to other great skate videos by Santa Cruz, Vision, Sims, and Blockhead. New pro-models had come out and Tommy's board wasn't as cutting edge as it once was, but I always loved the graphic. So I bought other boards and moved on. This was also a time when you couldn't order boards off the interwebs...you were stuck with whatever they had at the local skateshop, so it may be harder to find that Guerrero board you wanted so bad. Fast forward to the current time and I still think about that original graphic I loved so much. Powell Peralta recently decided to repop limited numbers of those original Bones Brigade boards they made and I finally got my chance to get my hands on one. So I scooped this up the minute I saw it. I am grateful to own this sweet piece of history and an important memory in my life...

2 comments:

WhitelinePsycho said...

Excellent tale Dave, really cool to read your personal story on the addiction of skating . . . I think it was Mountain who did the double for Fox in the flick, enjoy the decks and the memories man.

Ben said...

Beautiful deck.